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IDF – Web Communication Course – Answer 4

IDF – Web Communication Course – Answer 4

Today the Interactive Design Foundation said:

“Consider your current website.
What can you do to increase consumer trust?
What can you do to increase consumer familiarity?
What can you to to construct a sense of presence?”

To which BW & AW replied:

I. Increasing Consumer Trust:

We should definitely offer the book with a money-back offer, and also a soliloquy promising to not hold it against you if you return the book, a soliloquy that should make clear that we ourselves have misgivings about the book, and that if you don’t like this one, we hope you’ll still like the next one, since it has to be better than this one–if it isn’t, we just don’t know how we’ll get by!

II. Increasing Consumer Familiarity:

No one’s heard of us. If there’s lots to do on the site that is free and worthwhile, people will goof around with us awhile and then start to know our ways and so we’ll become familiar to them. Unfortunately, the site has only madcap to offer. Maybe if we made a Pure Love Certificate you could download for free. Why? It would demonstrate that, all kidding aside, insofar as it is within our power, we are happy to give away all the Pure Love we have. And it could be short and sweet, unlike so much of our literary attempts. In the same vein, we need to pay a lot of attention to introducing the writings: it should be very easy to find writings that most people will find engaging and avoid the ones most people will consider overly long-winded.

III. Increasing Presence

Let’s make some skits! We wrote some ads for products. Let’s film them and embed them or link to them. This will also enhance familiarity. However, by seeing our movements, the way we hold our bodies, and the attitudes of our facial contortions, customers will perceive that we are bits of string slowly unfurling and fraying, which will decrease their trust in us. Perhaps if we hired actors.

IV. But shouldn’t we be helping consumers see what a scam advertising/presentation is?

Definitely. We need some way to point out that neither Amazon nor Wandering Albatross Press is really their friend. We at Wandering Albatross Press would like to run our business in a way that is good for everyone, but we are still selling something. Everyone thinks that they are OK and blah blah blah; but who among us even truly wants to do what’s best for everyone, let alone knows how to and does it? I know! We’ll issue a certificate of our official heartfelt apology for only kind of meaning to be truly kind–as another free download.

BW/AMW/WHATEVER

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

We are worried! We are fretted! Our foreheads are corrugated! Our eyes are pinched! Our hands tremble like the flutter of a dove’s wings as it settles down into its bouncy olive branch.

The “Statement of Faith” is boring and confusing! Ditto for the “Intro to Something Deeperism”. What are we to do!?

The “About this Text” introductory material to “The Pitch” is somehow off. The mishap lies, we believe, mostly in the quotes attributed to Constantine Clement George.

a self-described “Romantic Robin a pecking at the egg forever and evermore”

Just doesn’t quite sit right. And the long speech that he supposedly made his seducees swear is somehow too much; I get bored before finishing it.

And then there’s the ending of “Chapter 1: Love Engineer”! If you follow a proof for the infinitude of primes and then conclude that there are in fact an infinitude of primes, you are making a metaphysical leap even more wild than the one from the experience of Pure Love to the conclusion that Pure Love in fact exists. For if Pure Love exists, it seems quite likely that the experience of Pure Love would carry within it certain knowledge of what you are experiencing (ie: the experience of Pure Love would have the stamp of Truth within it); but even if the standard human mathematics where we believe to have found proof for an infinite number of primes exists, it seems unlikely that any experience of mathematical logic would have “Absolute Truth” imprinted upon it as clearly and indelibly as the experience of Pure Love. On the other hand, perhaps the ending of “Love Engineer” is not supposed to assume the leap from a mathematical proof of the infinitude of primes to the metaphysical belief that an infinite number of primes actually exists, but just an affirmation that there’s an infinitude of primes within the mathematical system where we just proved there’s an infinitude of primes. In that case, it seems that the author of “Love Engineer” is confusing the experience of a proof within a system with the experience of a proof beyond all systems. Very worrisome. And so what can we do? How can we proceed? What God will answer our jumbled, confused, blathering prayers?

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW
Time: The worry time

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)